"Miller, the executive director of United For a Fair Economy, and Lapham, a co-founder of UFE's Responsible Wealth project, argue that the self-made myth absolves our economic leaders from doing anything about inequality, frames fair wages as extortion from deserving producers, and turns the social safety net into a moral hazard that can only promote laziness and sloth. They argue that progressives need to overwrite this fiction with the far more supportable idea of the "built-together reality," which points up the truth that nobody in America ever makes it alone. Every single private fortune can be traced back to basic public investments that have, as Warren Buffet argues in the book, created the most fertile soil on the planet for entrepreneurs to succeed."

53 Comments

Thanks! I've really annoyed with these crap stories about how self-made and hard working the wealthy are. I'm bumping this. We know its all a crock. Typing trolls are working so hard they have time to spam the boards. If they have two nickles to rub together for their efforts its a waste of metal.

Is this your idea of work? You get a nice fat check and pat on the back from the big boys for being a good little doggy? Can you say, "Yeahsa Master!", "You is so good to me,Master!" "I'll whip them other slaves right into shape for you Master!" "Need your balls washed, Master!" Troll babies, they're so ugly they're cute!

Horatio Alger myths have been feeding the American system for over a hundred years. What better way to hoard the wealth than to get the simpletons to believe they have the chance to hoard the wealth also.

Those 'basic public investments' that you are talking of is available to everyone and exists to be utilized by everyone. Not every kid who attended Bill Gates school turned out to be a billionaire. Not every kid growing up in Silicon Valley became a Steve Jobs.

Sure this country provides the basic public infrastructure that lays the fertile ground for the American dream. But that is common to all Americans. What each one does with the opportunities is what differentiates between the sqautters on wall street and those guys working in the offices nearby.

I am not a conservative. Never voted republican so far. But Obama hasn't lived up to all that he promised. Sure the entire blame is not his and he has probably faced the hardest times as a American President in recent history. And yet, I am not so keen to vote for him this time.

no matter what any of the self pity party says, if you sit and do nothing but whine, all you'll get is NOTHING. Blame the greedy society for your woes. Convince yourselves you can't make it. Find an excuse for your misery and failure, and cling to it. Validate your delusioned selves, be my guest. The rest of the world will stand tall and buck the odds. You'll all be the peons in society if you choose to sit and whine that others have more, are luckier, and don't share it with you.

Who is using who? Are the dishwashers that work their way up to manager and then buy the business, using everyone on the way up including the lowliest worker and the wealthy owner for being able to have enough money to buy him out?

Yes, we are all connected and need each other. Are you going to change the circle of life? Self interest gets us up to work and support our family which is a good thing. It is when you have people who don't care if they hurt others that we see our self interest manifest into blind greed which has become epidemic.

It is a simplistic point. No one lives on island. Business owners require the labor of employees to make a profit. A celebrity needs fans to support their work. How can anyone make the claim they are self-made if they depend on other people for that wealth?

Reality does not support the notion of total Independence, aka self-made. Everything is BUILT-TOGETHER or INTERDEPENDENT. Consider the chain of food. Plankton are the basic food which support all life on Earth. Take away the plankton and everything else dies. Or how about photosynthesis. Take away the trees & plants, everything suffocates.

Take away the workers from the owners, and you get NO wealthy owners. Take away the fans from the celebrities, and you get NO wealthy celebrities.

there will always be people willling to work for less, to get by. Your theory is true. W/out the lowly worker, the CFO goes home to starve. But people will fill the roles they have to, to get by.

No one owes you a living. Get over it and get to work at being a billionaire. Prepare yourself if you're not born into wealth, or have connections to better your life. Be the person others want as a connection or mentor. It won't happen whining with resentment and envy.

I am unedecuated, but built a very successful business that's gone now, due to government regulations. I paid high taxes and owned whatever I wanted. Now my X employees have more. They get UI benefits. That's life pal. It aint fair and no one lied to you telling you it is. You get from what you put into it, maybe not. That's life. Millions of once wealthy men are broke now, bu no fault of theirs. Too bad. Many men have done nothing and are wealthy. So what. You aren't them.

So millions of wealthy men (let's exclude women or maybe add the word generic in parenthesis), are broke through no fault of their own, yet the argument is often made that a man (generic) who has been seeking work for several months is at fault for his situation when the company he worked for outsourced it's base to another country...

No one owes you a living. Who determines what is owed and what is not owed? I could extrapolate to say no one owes me a life either, and if we went by that edict, we could all just go around killing each other. But for the betterment of society's sake, we say that killing is wrong and immoral, and that it is in fact wrong. Everyone owns the right to live his or her life.

I think there is a very basic misconstruction here - "self-made" bears no reference whatsoever to an economic isolation; all relationships incorporated into our economic logic, all business relationships, all "friends," are relationships of reciprocity. It doesn't matter - the argument of governmental redistribution fails to recognize this thing of tax revenue, much of which is derived from the working and middle class... who, fully armed to the teeth, will never entirely submit to government to substantially defer their earnings to others. So I'm thinking the book might sell a few copies but certainly not enough to justify the effort of writing for those such as these who also seek self-made status as writers.

Funny that you use the word reciprocity when your view on tax revenue reflects more the predatory idea of - every man, woman, and child for himself. You even suggest you would act in violence before lifting a finger to defer more than a penny or two of your earnings to help strengthen society as a whole, which runs exact opposite to your use of the word 'friends'. Mighty neighborly of you.

I want to see the reasoning behind this statement - "taxation without consent is slavery". How did you come to this opinion? Is this gospel handed down from God? Just because you say it with authority, it is to be accepted. Nonsense. Explain your statements or don't make them to begin to with.

Those are the words of our ancestors, not only the Founding Fathers but also those such as Lincoln. Lincoln explained slavery with these words: "You work, I'll eat." And that is exactly what it is - it's the free acquisition of resources from the involuntary labor of another. Taxes are slavery in that the government owns a portion of our labor - to voluntarily consent for some perceived good is one thing but to have them taken from us, without our consent, for things we do no approve of, is absolute slavery. The government owns that portion of our labor which in some areas of this country currently amounts to as much as 50%.

So you are appealing to the authority of Founding Fathers and Abe Lincoln. As Leonardo da Vinci said, "Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory".

Meaning, to accept the founding fathers arguments as unchallengeable is to be dogmatic and rigid, making progress unattainable. Now, I understand full and well the whole 'force' argument about government. No one can deny it has the authority to enforce the agreed upon laws of the land. Bear in mind, the constitution says the government serves we the people, it does not say the government serves the mythical self-made man. So point to me specifically where it says in the constitution that taxation without consent is slavery. And since 'reciprocity' is the crux of your argument, please point me to where the constitution says "all relationships incorporated into our economic logic, all business relationships, all "friends," are relationships of reciprocity."

I am not appealing to the authority of the Founding Fathers; this authority is derived of the Constitution they created; I therefore turn to them, repeatedly, to determine original intent. And no, I do not do limit myself to the Federalist papers; to rely entirely on the Federalist papers when the Founders very words, interpretive opinions, and explanations have been preserved for us, as the Supreme Court quite often does, is simply irresponsible.

Dogmatic and rigid: the Constitution was created to afford the maximum freedom to some maximum citizenry and any resolution of challenge must ultimately consist of but two forms - it is necessarily either redundant as the reaffirmation of, or, it serves to legislate anew reassigning the rights of one to the favor of another; if rights were not of issue, the case would have never come before the Court in the first place. We are there to discover constitutionality, in the form of Constitutional right.

What you view as progressive the Fathers would have viewed as regressive; the reason they viewed our enumerated rights under the form of government they constituted as some maximum freedom is that for all of those thousands of years prior to this experiment there existed but one significant class division - one was either free or one was un-free. And in the colonial world many, and this definitely includes causasions - slavery itself was color blind - were un-free. The Fathers were simply that much closer to that which threatens us; they were intimately possessed of knowledge [of humankind] now long since forgotten; we are too far removed.

I don't understand the "force" argument of government; I have no idea what you're talking about. We are a communal species; there is interdependency that requires, in the process of filling necessary niches, some form of organizational structure, a hierarchy, and therefore some central authority. How we arrive there and what this actually consists of on the evolutionary scale is another matter entirely. (And it's huge).

There is little doubt that Lincoln decided the constitutionality of secession, and as incidental to, the issue of slavery. Of all the words contained within the documents of our citizenry during the revolutionary era, two words are most oft repeated - "liberty" and "slavery"; they were the words on everyone's mind. And the concept that taxes unauthorized by the payee are slavery comes not only from these Founding Fathers who created our Constitutional Republic but also all those several generations that preceded them - this is a direct quote that appears everywhere in colonial documents. If someone else owns a portion of our labor, then we are enslaved for that portion of our labor - we work, and they eat - and what we find is that slavery, just like freedom, arrives by matter of degree.

The concept of friends as relationships of reciprocity dates to the vernacular of the early colonial; more often relatives - fathers. uncles, brothers, cousins, etc. - were referred in documents simply as "friends" to signify some mutual support, an alliance. Many words, to include even those such as morality and charity, held entirely different meaning in the colonial vernacular. It is very important when studying documents that we are possessed of precise definition. This applies right down to Jefferson's Declaration - too few are possessed of the intimate knowledge necessary to decipher his words with precision.

If someone else owns a portion of our labor, then we are enslaved for that portion of our labor - we work, and they eat - and what we find is that slavery, just like freedom, arrives by matter of degree.

Apply that statement to the worker who works for the self-made man and you have it one hundred percent correct.

The worker who who works for the self-made man does so voluntarily, he's not enslaved to the man since he voluntarily capitalizes on his labor; there is profit to self through the sale of labor. But both involuntary pay taxes and both are enslaved for that portion of their labor. We have always taken care of the truly needy in this country but now for the first time in our history we are being asked to care for the capable yet needy; the rights are one are being assigned to the rights of another for this portion of our labor. Also, in reference to Arizona, this is the first time in our history when the alien criminal has been deemed to be admissible, granted a non-excludible status, non-deport-able status. These are radically new and unwelcome concepts, a red carpet refuge for the criminal, a virtual pirate's cove. To welcome the lawless to a nation of law is to undermine not only those laws instituted but the very ideal of government for and by the people. This Chicago Seven of Obama, Reid, Pelosi, and their court Jesters are real sickies... while we laugh for ourselves we cry for our children. If we had a real Supreme Court in this country, they would have declined to even hear Arizona.

I believe your quote, "To welcome the lawless to a nation of law is to undermine not only those laws instituted but the very ideal of government for and by the people," exposes your superficial concept of our reality. Not because Mexicans are coming across the border, but because you believe this is still a nation of law.

This nation of law has been destroyed by the financial industry and huge corporations, specifically causing the current recession and they are continuing to seek complete control.

We must hope that the LIBOR scandal will open the eyes of many to the plundering that is occuring in our supposed nation of law. Focusing on minor issues just prove to be distracting from the serious problem.

No one wants to take care of the capable yet needy, but I look at it differently. My hope is for everyone to recognize if civilisation is to improve, we must learn to feed each other.

This IS a Nation of Law in that the American people continue to defer to the force of law. One could just as easily govern without law and for thousands of years, in all parts of the world, this is exactly what occurred. You can imagine (or simply do your history) the problems that such rule can create for people.

The laws instituted were intended to insulate those governed from the arbitrary rule through physical force of those that govern.

You yourself have let issues cloud your reality. Reference recent attempts by the Obama, Pelosi, Reid, and their four court jesters to so expand the Commerce Clause to include even inactivity. The Individual Mandate would have allowed this Federal government to law-force any requirement they so desired. If, for example, it were determined in the future that increased reproduction was vital to the health of our nation - an undeniable truth - this one precedent would have enabled them to require, penalize, force-law, all that chose the inactivity of non-sexual participation in voluntary abstinence of this perceived, accurately or inaccurately, social imperative. Read Ginsburg, this is an absolute fact, and what it amounts to is the arbitrary rule of law as possessed by monarchy. And as you know, to rely on the arbitrarily applied benevolence of monarchy, weighed against personal ego, tends towards corruption absolutely, the aggrandizement of self in almost divine form, and the belief that every man, woman, and child everywhere and anywhere within the sphere of their influence, serve at their personal pleasure.

Mankind ruled every part of the world in this manner for thousands of years and there are many in this world who continue to defer to this historic cultural perception of arbitrary power and authority, where the strong rule the weak in any manner they so desire. If this is the cultural perception, what respect our lines in the sand as law?

The Constitutional conservative is no less concerned about healthcare, nor is he a less compassionate individual, he simply seeks to retain the liberty, through the preservation of that governing structure that allows all, including the poor, the liberty to pursue personal happiness inclusive of whatever social imperative, as weighed against community censure and that force of law.

Couple the desire to create legislation with the ability to circumvent Congress through "budget reconciliation" and a Constitutional court that believes any and all law created by the Fed is enforceable upon the people, and you will see the vehicle of your social imperative disappear overnight. And we will bow to the trillionaire King, or die. This isn't just an abstract construct born of fear, either - we have thousands of years of evidence that would support such a conclusion.

Congress, it seems, wants to feed the poor or in this case provide them with healthcare. Ok, so we tried this experiment in New York, one of the richest states in the Nation, and it failed because we were bankrupting the taxpaper supported government; we couldn't afford it. And if Congress wants to feed the poor, or provide them with healthcare, then they should do so themselves, not transfer this responsibility and necessary legislation to the profit of insurance companies, which repeatedly report record earnings, and supplement it with the monies of the 99%. Virtually every paragraph of the liberal court is BS, as a perversion of both law and logic, that can be easily refuted legally and morally.

I agree with you that for thousands of years, the strong rule the weak in any manner they so desire. All, including the poor, should have the liberty to pursue personal happiness. Having liberty, but without equality, would continue to allow rulers to circumvent the rule of law. They simply exempt themselves as they are currently.

Advancements have been made through the years such as the creation of this nation, with the Declaration of Independence as the centerpiece. Our current reality however is similar to the thousands of years to which you refer. You mentioned the laws instituted were intended to insulate those governed from arbitrary rule, and I agree, but justice is not here. We may be insulated from some arbitrary rules, but there are rules allowing corruption, and the Ideal of Equality for all has been pushed aside.

There are some who are strong that have the desire to protect the weak, not just rule them. They are the people we should choose to govern ourselves.

Contained within the Affordable Care Act is a provision to provide illegals with healthcare under Medicaid without income limit, while citizens and legal aliens are limited to of 133% of the Fed poverty line... Both of the two man tenets, or supporting pillars - the Individual Mandate and the Medicaid expansion - were found to be unconstitutional, the latter by seven of the nine Justices, including - amazingly enough - Kagan...

In reference to "inactivity" under the Commerce Clause, Scalia, as always "spot on," eminently logical and brilliant, stated the following: "such a definition of market participants is unprecedented and were it to be a premise for the excessive of national power, it would have no principled limits." The Constitution exists solely for the purpose of limiting Federal power; to leave governance to the rule of their benevolence is the equivalent of conferring upon government the Divine Right of kings.

Don't be fooled: the Act was pushed through Congress with a simple majority of 51 votes under a process known as "budget reconciliation" in violation of its own "Byrd Rules"; it would have destroyed all last remaining remnants of any concept of individual "right," and in eliminating the ability of the state to voluntarily "opt out," or resist coercive measures, conferred upon the Fed the power to usurp all State governance in instituting ANY program it so desired.

This was a massive power grab and its true intent was NOT to provide healthcare for our poor or to extend benefits to those formerly denied by the insurance company - these are but enticement - the true intent was to provide healthcare without limit to ALL illegal aliens supported through both increased insurance costs and Fed, State, and local taxes.

What is also particularly disturbing when we read Ginsburg, whose minority decision amounts in style and fashion to little more than a criminal defense with its attempts to spin the limit of law as it applies inept and inexact analogy to prove that twist, is the overall authoritative tenor - individual and state compliance by command and demand.

People are forced by circumstances to consent to all sorts of horrors and injustices, so I don't give a shit if it is justifiable by some moronic argument that says it is okay to exploit another as long as they voluntarily accept the exploitation. Given other options, we both know they would not accept any piss poor conditions the mythical self-made man imposes on them.

There are many, many people in this country and throughout the world who seek to capitalize on their labor in an effort to acquire resources. And we are a communal species - there's a lot of work to do if we are to survive - and this requires some organizational structure. The value of one's labor is entirely subjective; the voluntary worker rarely feels he's being exploited in America.

This abstract construct of self-made man as someone successfully self-employed and therefore immoral in that he has profited or capitalized is rather bizarre; I am uncertain what the options are unless one is born of and into monarchy. All else labor in some form, including the self made man. The fact that you are not born into such a situation has obviously incited you in envy, and your only hope, in terms of self esteem and mental stability, I would suppose, is to gain yourself some religion; otherwise you may well wallow in your depressive self pity forever.

I do not see envy, self pity, or wallowing among the courageous protesters of
OWS.

I see hard working, intelligent people who recognize that the hard work of Americans is being exploited by the wealthiest. Our wages have been kept low artificially, Our jobs sent overseas in the name of profit for the plutocrats, our unions busted, pensions raided, Our govt stolen with unfair campaign contribution laws.

In many other ways the good honest hard working Americans are being taken advantage of. Do you stand with the wealthy 1% as they prey on the 99%?

I don't see whining, You offensive labeling of these good people fighting for the rights of the 99% reflects the adherence to the right wing 1% tactic of blaming the victim.

We;re not whining, We don't want anything for free. We just want our money back from the criminal 1% banksters who crashed the world economy, lost 40% of our home value, created a four year old unemployment crises and took a taxpayer bailout while they continue to take obscene, unjustified, unearned exec salaries, and bonuses.

Punish these criminals by forcing them to forgive the debt they still hold over our heads (cr card, student loans, and mtg debt) That would be justice.!

Fuck no, it isn't. That's why I'm here, to fight for a more fair life for everybody!

And yes, I work VERY HARD at what I do. I work crazy hours as well. A lot of people on here do, and I know so many people who are working 2-3 jobs whom I would say works harder than all of us.

The fact is, wealth comes from hard work, preparation, luck, and timing. Its easy for people to do the first two things, but you can't beat lady luck at her own game.

Ex: If I was in college or about to enter college in the 70s, then I would have been at the cusp of the PC era, and with my intellect would have been able to start a Microsoft or Apple.

Another Ex: How many Facebook clones existed before Facebook came along? According to AddThis, I can create an AddThis bar that links to over 300 social networking sites! I've visited a lot of them, signed NDAs to work on a few, and I can tell you that many of them had the same features, or even better features, than Facebook has now. Did the people behind all of these other social networking sites not work hard?

"The fact is, wealth comes from hard work, preparation, luck, and timing. Its easy for people to do the first two things, but you can't beat lady luck at her own game. "

I agree with this statement, but it doesn't really fit in with your article above. One of the points already made here is that the resources listed in the article are available to EVERYONE. I think maybe people are reading too much into the term 'self-made.' To me, it doesn't mean that the person built up a business in isolation, only that their success wasn't handed to them. It wasn't from an inheritance, or even being hired into a successful company - they built it themselves.

We know many are born to wealth, lucky to have family or connections, so what?

You aren't them. So you better stop whining like babies and figure out how to get ahead. There has to be leaders and bosses, and the lower status worker. That's life, and no one said it was fair. We live in a plutocratic world. The people with the wealth run it. So instead of whining that you don't have what wall st crooks have, figure out how to go get it. I worked 70hr weeks for 30yrs. Built a bsuiness that made tons of $$. My X employees now have more than I do, with UI benefits. I don't get it because I was self employed.

Get educated, prepare to take risks, and work harder than you have to date, and you may be the CEO of Ford someday. But you won't be squat if you would rather wallow in self pity and play the resentful, envy game. It will ruin you. We certainly know corp America is based on greed. So what. So sorry. Too bad. Wouldn't you likem to be able to rake in millions? It won't happen with you whining on blogs or protesting. The ambitious and successful people aren't sitting around whining. They are working at it, and willing to put in the long hard years to get there. You haven't put in the time, and even if you do, there's no gaurantees. So sorry. Too bad. That's life.

Thanks for posting this! I agree, there is zero chance for any of us to succeed so what's the point of even trying? Sure, there's always stories around and we see successful people all the time but it's never going to happen for us no matter if we even tried!

I say we're doing the right thing, government will take care of us once we destroy these evil capitalists!

And what, Miller and Lapham are NOT self-made men, are you kidding me? You know there are only two types of people in the economic world - there are those who care for others and those who require care. No one denies interdependency but the economy itself is an apparatus that lives outside humanity; it is a corporate machine entity that cannot be derailed. And when you look to those who have derived greater benefit from the machine, for either a voluntary or involuntary donation, you become a capable yet pride-less beggar, like the dog who wags his tail for a bone, utterly incapable of the ancient hunt... you have evolved to incorporate beggary into personal economic logic, incapable of anything else.

I don't know there is a 1 in 175,000,000 chance to win lotto and some people do win it every year. Maybe there is a rags to riches story about a ghetto kid who grew up to become a great inventor. Show me the odds of that happening, cause right now lotto looks good!